“Story with a Real Beast and a Little Blood”: on Rose McLarney’s Its Day Being Gone

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“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” Kentuckian Chris Offutt chose that line from Joan Didion’sThe White Album as the epigraph for his memoir, No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. Appalachian literature plays an elegaic refrain. It is a literature of dislocation and transition and survival. Ron Rash, echoing Offutt, reflects how everybody who lived on the two-mile dirt road that led to his grandmother’s farm was either family or friend. Now, “I probably know three families out of 60 or 70. And that place is gone. The accent’s gone. A lot of the culture is disappearing.”

Rash and Offutt hesitate to sentimentalize that passing world, but the pull is inescapable. As Rash says, “there’s something in us as human beings that–we know our lives are transitory, but we want something not to be transitory, something to endure, whether it’s a landscape or a place.” Rash’s poem “Preserves” is a concise dramatization of that process. After a funeral, the dead’s land and property are divided among kin, but the narrator has forgotten a springhouse. He opens the rotting door and he finds “woodslats bowed with berry and vegetable.” The double meaning of the poem’s title is less meant to be clever than funereal, as the family “heaped our paper plates and ate, one chair / closest to the stove unfilled.”

Later this year, Rash’s novel Serena gets the full Hollywood treatment. Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper will likely send more readers back to his work, including his newest release, Above the Waterfall. For many readers, the life and fiction of Breece D’J Pancake still haunts the discussion of Appalachian literature. Pancake killed himself in 1979 at 27-years-old, and his rough but lyric tales have made him a martyr. Jon Michaud’s recent retrospective at The New Yorker is a fitting tribute. He recommends Thomas E. Douglass’s biography, A Room Forever, and Samantha Hunt’s essay “The Secret Handshake,” which appeared in The Believer. I would add Marion Field’s touching “Complicated Manners” from the Oxford American. But start with the man’s fiction; my favorites are “The Way It Has To Be” and “Time and Again.”

It would be foolish to deny Pancake’s literary influence on how we speak about literary Appalachia. The parallel nature of his passionate but short life, his brief output (he only published enough stories to fill one book), and the crafted compression of his tales make him almost too perfect of a symbol. During a review of Rusty Barnes’s story collection, Mostly Redneck, I positively compared Barnes to Pancake, noting that both writers used finely crafted settings to add gravity to the minutia of their characters’ lives. In an interview, Barnes pushed back against my comparison, citing a frustration with reviewers using Pancake as metonym for Appalachian literature. While that certainly wasn’t my intention, I welcome his excellent list of other noteworthy contemporaries from the region: Nikki Finney, Frank X. Walker, Lee Smith, Lisa Koger, Maurice Manning, Silas House, James Still, Crystal Wilkinson, Charles Dodd White, Gurney Norman, Denise Giardina, Mark Powell, Pinckney Benedict, and Chris Offutt. Readers should get Red Holler: Contemporary Appalachian Literature, edited by John Branscum and Wayne Thomas, or issues of Appalachian Heritage, Still, and Appalachian Journal to see the newest work coming from Appalachia. Countless others could be added to Barnes’s list, including Harry Humes, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tom Bailey, the late Irene McKinney, Ann Pancake, RT Smith, Fred Chappell, Joseph Bathanti, and Scott McClanahan, whose memoir, Crapalachia, is a self-admitted yarn. “God bless those who keep trying to make myths,” he writes.

One of the finest mythmakers in contemporary Appalachian letters is Rose McLarney, a poet from western North Carolina. Although she now teaches in Oklahoma, while looking for her first teaching job back east, McLarney “was living without electricity, hiking 17 miles to use the phone or internet.” Her first book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, hits elegaic notes, as in poems like “Autumn Again,” where the sumac-stabbed hills create a beautiful color, but “this time of year, there is always / a wounded feeling.” Her first book was not provincial, but her newest release, Its Day Being Gone, widens her range.

The book begins with violence. In “Facing North,” the narrator needs to put down a sick goat. “Silent animals” on the farm watch in judgment. She is not without guilt, wondering if she “should have given her southerly pasture,” and then cleverly turning the hesitance on herself, thinking “I should have gone in another direction.” Her threnody might seem archaic. After all, “In this era, when there is no need / to farm, who is drawn to have livestock, / which die so much?” Yet again, the narrator has used “animals / as the figures for my sorrows.” But she is “still here. / I can’t stay away / from the hard images.”

Those hard images, like the tenuous truths of McClanahan’s memoir, are no less painful if they are myths. Later in the collection, McLarney writes “much of what you grew up with had already faded– / there was less paint than rust on the metal, and littler / hope.” This tension between past and present, reality and hope moves the book forward. In “Shadow Cat,” the narrator walks a dirt road, thinking how the “houses on bits of flat / kept their backs to the walls / of mountains, knowing / their place.” The natural world reigns, and is untouched until higher up the mountain, where a man pulling a bulldozer whispered a warning: “Careful out here alone. / Big cat will get you.” She’s been hearing such admonitions her entire life, although few people have actually seen such animals. She wonders if the warnings are a comfort, “keeping alive the belief / that what wildness abides / out there is the danger.”

Dangerous, but it is their wildness, and the narrator of “Watershed” defends the local, “murky” waterways. She is not interested in clear water “filtered by mosses and lichens.” She wants an “ancient, worn landscape,” where she can swim over sunken cars. A certain level of toughness is expected. Someone who enters her house must be “unafraid / of stumbling on sagging floors, into low doorframes, features / of old structures, the past, people I know.”

Great books can be local, but Its Day Being Gone gains another dimension through the inclusion of McLarney’s chapbook, Hone Creek, originally published in Mudlark. The poems in this sequence dramatize the upheaval of South American communities from hydroelectric damming. “Imminent Domain” introduces the section. Although McLarney does not identify herself as an activist–“as much as [my poems] say what is wrong, [they] end up admitting my complicity”–these poems are written with anger. Although some of these engineers “meant well,” “Power always is sent to serve regions other / than where it is made.”

The disparate regions are also connected by methods of storytelling. McLarney’s narrators often smirk, as good yarn spinners do. “Setting,” a story about a thief and his lover, is told “because I want your attention. For you to come for dinner again.” These “bellyful tales,” told “when no one is hungry,” are variations on a theme:

No, there’s nothing new in it. But it couldn’t be richer.
What would you rather have than a thing you know
spiced and simmered, spoken and seconded,

in another’s accent?

Its Day Being Gone is several books in one, and “Story with a Real Beast and a Little Blood in It” helps decode the synthesis. A bull breaks loose, and after the men, “butted and bruised / with rope-burned hands, give up,” the narrator makes a path of sweet feed that leads into a gated fence. But she pauses the poem to warn that we should “not look to make any allegories, / for any meaning beyond the marvel.” In Its Day Being Gone, McLarney has it both ways. Her stories are real, but they are symbols. Appalachia will remain, but it helps that the region has such skilled writers to document its truths and myths. McLarney’s poems contain enough eloquence to make a passing world permanent. Her work reminds us that when the bull ran, when the past began to fade, you “followed / on your knees down the mountain, noting / even in brambles, as you bled, the stars.”

Nick Ripatrazone
is a staff writer for The Millions. He has written for Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Kenyon Review. His newest book is Ember Days, a collection of stories. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and twin daughters. Follow him @nickripatrazone and find more of his writing at www.nickripatrazone.com.

Rick Moody’s fifth novel, Hotels of North America, written as a series of reviews of inns and motels, appears at first glance to epitomize the term “high concept.” I recoiled when I realized the setup, as I always do when confronted with these kinds of projects. “It’s Moby-Dick retold in tweets!” people say, as if having come up such an idea makes its presence on Earth worthwhile. “It’s a movie about a chronic cheat who, thanks to his son’s birthday wish, can’t tell a lie!” I feel I’ve suffered through it having only heard the logline. I’ve always believed that books based on this kind of gimmickry beg to be judged more harshly than all others, and it takes either a certain kind of courage or a certain kind of obliviousness even to attempt one.
Like all reviews, the ones in Hotels of North America say less about what they purport to appraise than they do about than the appraiser himself. In this case, the author claims to be an itinerant, middle-aged man who makes his living as a motivational speaker and, as the book progresses, as a Top Reviewer for RateYourLodging.com, from which the content of the book is supposedly drawn. I say “claims,” because his true identity is called into question, first by commenters on the site, to whose suspicions he replies -- “Again, I have to address briefly the idea that I am not who I say I am, a line of argument fomented by KoWojahk283 and by TigerBooty!, but not exclusively by them.” -- and second by Rick Moody himself, who in an afterword claims to have become fixated on finding the reviews’ true creator, who goes by the name Reginald Edward Morse.
The eloquent author of said reviews frequently deviates into full-on brilliance as he writes about all things lodging related and non-lodging related in a series of 37 dispatches penned wherever he happens to be staying at the time of his writing, on the subject of wherever he was staying during the significant events of his life, starting as early as his first childhood experience staying in a hotel. That entry -- titled in the style of all of the book’s sections: “The Plaza Hotel, 768 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, December 27, 1970-January 2, 1971” -- marks one of the author’s rare “four star” stays.
Most of them don’t rank so well. Take for instance, “La Quinta Inn, 4122 McFarland Boulevard East, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, January 5-9, 2002,” a place so grim that Reginald resorts to medication. “The list of Ambien side effects,” he writes, “includes headache, depression, sleepiness, and profound personality change, and nearly all of the literature suggests that you should call your doctor if, while taking Ambien, you have a profound personality change, but the question, in this rearview mirror, is whether the profound personality change I experienced in La Quinta in Tuscaloosa was caused by the Ambien or by the La Quinta itself. For example, the interior decorating of La Quinta could in fact cause profound personality change, as this decorating had a nauseating insistence on what I like to call Mexican pastels.” The “review” goes on from there, finally settling on a one-star rating.
In general, Reginald is most likely to be found boarding at inns averaging, by his own rating, only two stars. And not only inns. He (sometimes joined by his girlfriend, K.) can also be found, during low points, staying overnight at Union Station, am Ikea Parking Lot, and Sid’s Hardware. Wherever he roams, he reviews not only the beds, keys, clerks, and lobby cookies (“I adamantly oppose the attempt to buy hotel allegiance with cookies.”), but also his collapsing life itself, a past marriage and affair, fatherhood, and which short con works best when it comes to getting early check-ins and discounts, or for skipping out on the bill entirely. Though Reginald is not a man notable for his high ethical standards -- in fact, he’s sort of terrible -- he is undeniably funny. In describing the disappointing cookie from the first section titled “Dupont Embassy Row, Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, DC, October 31-November 2, 2010,” Reginald writes, “So as K. and I walked out of the Dupont to try to find a steak joint in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, we broke the complimentary cookie obtained in the lobby into small pieces and flung it over the fence of the Indonesian embassy, thinking that the scheming and warlike Indonesians were probably out at the time, and in the event that the Indonesians had not fed their local squirrels.”
I am not a seeker of funny books, nor do I look to fiction for laffs, or even laughs, but this book had me giggling so often and so loudly that I began to annoy the person with whom I dwell. Reading Hotels of North America as I did, over the course of two days, seemed the perfect dose of humor and insight. All comic novels should aspire to such heights.
I braced myself for the downhill slide with every new chapter, aware of the notorious difficulty involved in keeping artistic gimmicks from going stale, but my interest and investment only deepened as the novel wore on, as Moody revealed not only a man, but an entire culture through these scattered fragments that mirror the workings of memory and of real day-to-day living. Four out four stars.

Among the many soothing stories we craft around death, most of us harbor a core belief that it will, at the very least, be peaceful. Even those with no residual belief in an afterlife can find some solace in the idea of an eternal quiet nothingness. No pain, no suffering, no obnoxious neighbors or megalomaniacal bank clerks.
But what if it’s all a lie? What if, instead of peace or rest, what awaits us after death is a continuation of exactly the same petty dramas and sordid resentments? What if, after we’re lowered into our graves, we discover that all the other corpses in the cemetery are still chattering away in some kind of eternal bitchfest?
These are the questions at the heart of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s modernist classic Cré na Cille. Originally published in Irish (sometimes called Gaelic) in 1949, it’s now available in English for the first time, translated by Alan Titley under the title The Dirty Dust. Often mentioned in the same breath as works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Ó Cadhain’s novel is, in some ways, even more radically experimental. For starters, all the characters are dead and speaking from inside their coffins, which are interred in a graveyard in Connemara, on Ireland’s west coast. The novel has no physical action or plot, but rather some 300 pages of cascading dialogue without narration, description, stage direction, or any indication of who’s speaking when.
We begin with Catriona Paudeen, a bitter, foul-mouthed, recently deceased local woman, frantically wondering whether her family has provided her with an appropriate funeral and buried her in the well-to-do section of the cemetery. Within a few pages, she’s absorbed into a chorus of competing voices as she realizes she’s surrounded by her old neighbors, some friends but mostly enemies, “all rabbiting on exactly the same way as they did above the ground!” The conversation mostly circles around everyday grievances -- unpaid debts, unfaithful wives, contentious football games -- although political disputes occasionally crop up, mostly related to the Irish Civil War and the Second World War (certain corpses are so nationalistic that they eagerly ask new arrivals whether Adolf Hitler has successfully destroyed England yet). As Titley writes in his thoughtful introduction, the novel is “a listening-in to gossip and to backbiting and rumours and bitching and carping and moaning and obsessing about the most important, but more often the most trivial matters of life, which are often the same thing.”
There are similarities between The Dirty Dust and Jean-Paul Sartre’sHuis Clos, in which three sinners are condemned to spend eternity in a small room together, acting as one another’s torturers (“hell is other people”). However, while Sartre’s play is full of heavy-handed moral and religious overtones, The Dirty Dust is remarkable for its lack of philosophy or theology. The idea of retaining consciousness while the body decomposes seems dark to the point of hellishness, but the text itself is so mundane, irreverent, and raucously funny that the grisly context slides into insignificance. One might surmise that the characters are in purgatory, but since they’re too busy arguing to reflect on their existential state, the theory lacks a foothold.
Essentially, this novel is all talk, and the historical and literary significance of the original lies in the richness of the spoken language, the warts-and-all reproduction of a dialect that, just 70 years later, has all but disappeared. Unfortunately, while Titley’s translation is sensitive and vibrant, it occasionally and inevitably feels stilted or overwrought. The narrow, uninspiring register of English curse words, for example, simply cannot capture the diversity of Irish language insults. Although Titley valiantly conjures terms like “sailor’s bicycle,” “shitehawk,” and “slut of the small spuds,” he also over-relies on shag, shit, bugger, bitch, and other less quotable English perennials. This danger -- that the effusive, flowing text of the author may, at times, be reduced to generic translates -- is fundamental to the translator’s work. However, as Gayatri Spivak argues in her essay “The Politics of Translation,” “to defer action until the production of the utopian translator, is impractical.” For decades, Irish language purists (we might also call them snobs) have rejected even the possibility of translating Cré na Cille, condemning it to irrelevance outside the walls of university libraries. Titley’s effort to translate the untranslatable, with full knowledge of its inevitable imperfections, is courageous and timely.
For hundreds of years, Irish has been battling the hegemonic language next door and, despite a partial revival in the last century, it continues to decline. Connemara, the setting for The Dirty Dust, is a designated “Gaeltacht” region, where Irish remained the primary spoken language long after it fell out of everyday usage elsewhere. Despite government subsidies intended to protect their linguistic identity, a recent report suggests that within 10 years Irish will no longer be the primary language even in these small enclaves.
Sad though this decline is, The Dirty Dust dispels any misplaced nostalgia for Connemara’s over-idealized past. The humor is very dark indeed, reflecting the reality that that Irish survived in these communities partly as a result of deprivation, isolation, and lack of opportunity. Accusations of theft, fraud, alcoholism, and violence rise above the chatter, before being quickly, desperately denied; ubiquitous nationalism, racism, and misogyny almost blend into the cacophony; and when the voices reflect on what they would have done with a little more time above ground, the overwhelming focus is on settling petty scores, chasing trifling debts, and suing neighbours over imaginary infractions. By the final pages, it’s clear that long before their deaths, the characters lived in a dark, narrow, airless world, where grinding poverty and religious conservatism gave rise to bitter hatreds between secretive, jealous, spiritually stale people.
It’s no surprise, then, that the cemetery’s new arrivals report the departure of waves of young people for England and America. Since the 1840s, mass migration from the Gaeltacht areas has been central to the decline of the language. And who could blame those who left in search of opportunity and relative freedom? While we may regret the loss of the language -- and resent its suppression through force and economic coercion -- native speakers can’t be expected to make vast personal sacrifices for the sake of a vague notion of cultural heritage. What’s more, Ireland’s current austerity government shows no willingness to make the kind of investment that might draw younger populations back.
All of this emphasises the significance of the translated edition. By exhuming Ó Cadhain’s zany chorus of cadavers, Titley has opened this masterpiece to the wider audience it so richly deserves.
May it not rest in peace.

When was the last time you read something from the humor section? It's probably been a while. If memory serves, that particular bookstore ghetto is filled with quickly dated political humor, books of redneck jokes, and similar diversions: Books some people might buy as gifts for non-readers, but never for themselves. Others wisely steer clear of the section altogether. As such, it's possible that people have gone through their reading lives without happening upon a book like Woody Allen's Without Feathers.Though Woody Allen, of course, remains a household name because of his films, readers of my generation may not be aware that he is an equally accomplished humorist and his work was collected in a trio of books in the 1970s. Without Feathers was published in 1972, but 34 years later it remains hilarious.The book contains an assortment of sketches, often take-offs of scholarly writings, like "Early Essays" which references Francis Bacon'sEssays, in which Allen observes that "The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there is no afterlife - a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave." Allen also returns again and again to words and phrases that he finds funny for whatever reason, like "chives," "herring," "smelts," and having a hat "blocked." The book also includes a pair of manic, absurd plays, "Death" and "God."It's hard for me to describe how funny this book was except to say that it may be one of the funniest books I have ever read. I kept Mrs. Millions awake because I kept guffawing as I read it. Instead of taking my word for it, though, here's a particularly funny tidbit from the first chapter, "Selections from Mr. Allen's Notebook":Play idea: a character based on my father, but without quite so prominent a big toe. He is sent to the Sorbonne to study the harmonica. In the end he dies, never realizing his one dream -- to sit up to his waist in gravy. (I see a brilliant second-act curtain, where two midgets come upon a severed head in a shipment of volleyballs.)Bonus Link: Millions contributor Andrew's look at Without Feathers and Allen's other two collections, Getting Even and Side Effects.

For civil libertarians, the inauguration of President Barack Obama augurs not only a brighter future, but a chance to shed light on the recent past. It goes almost without saying that the Bush Administration has, with its declaration of permanent war and attendant claims of executive privilege, sought to move the balance of power in this country in the direction of monarchy. Its (unsuccessful) arguments before the Supreme Court in the Hamdi and Rasul cases amounted to: "L'etat, c'est moi." Now, to judge by the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, those responsible for torture, for the lawless detention of American citizens, for illegal state surveillance, and for perjury may finally be brought to justice.Such a development would not be universally acclaimed. Bush partisans, not to mention the former President himself, have suggested that once Obama gets "read in" on still-classified interrogation and wiretapping programs, he may embrace their utility in fighting terrorism. Other conservatives have argued - less tendentiously, I think - that any "truth and reconciliation" process for former White House officials would touch off a political firestorm sufficient to engulf the rest of the Obama agenda. But, in the absence of a legal reckoning, the civil libertarians wonder, how will we ever learn what went wrong?The contours of this debate, as it currently stands, obscure an important fact: that the Bush Administration's gravest depredations are already matters of public record. Thanks to Seymour Hersh'sChain of Command, George Packer'sThe Assassin's Gate, and Mark Danner'sTorture and Truth, we know, for example, that the Vice President, the Director of the C.I.A., and the Secretary of Defense signed off on the torture of "enemy combatants." Whether or not this merits prosecution is open to discussion, but there is little need to establish a new set of institutions to expose the Bush Administration's wrongdoing. We've got an institution that works well. It's called investigative journalism.Two of the most recent and compelling books about the outgoing administration - Jane Mayer'sThe Dark Side and Barton Gellman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency - argue persuasively that the Bush approach to civil liberties departed from previous presidential scandals less in degree than in kind. While Clinton and Nixon broke the law, Vice President Dick Cheney and his bureaucratic enforcers attempted to rewrite it: to place executive power on a footing other than the inalienable rights of man.Of the two books, Gellman's comes the closest to offering the satisfactions of good literature, and thus should probably be approached with the most caution. Still, at least one of those satisfactions - a rich and complex protagonist - lends Gellman's reporting the ring of truth.In its relentless detail, Angler would seem at first to bolster the leftist caricature of Cheney as merely the Machiavellian power behind the throne. Gellman uncovers several incidents with profound legal and national-security implications in which Cheney "rolled" the president. Moreover, he documents a pattern in which vast tracts of what would become the most important areas of public policy were knowingly entrusted to the judgment of the vice president. Cheney's former counselor Mary Matalin explains that he arrived in office with a 'preordained policy portfolio' that spanned 'the economic issues, the security issues - even before 9/11, we had homeland security - and the energy issues... the iron issues, I don't know what else to call them. The steely issues. Apart from those, 'we had the go-to guy on the hill' because of Cheney's Senate duties and experience in the House."That was a remarkable list," Gellman notes:war and peace, the economy, natural resources, and negotiations with Congress. Nor was Matalin's description complete. It omitted, among other things, a preeminent role for Cheney in nominations and appointments, which did not stop with the transition. Cheney's brief, all in all, encompassed most of the core concerns of any president.On the other hand, Gellman is careful to complicate his portrait. For example, he shows a connoisseur's appreciation for Cheney's remarkable gifts as a bureaucrat. The Vice President, a former White House Chief-of-Staff, evidently brought to his new office a mastery of personnel matters: whom to place where, and which jobs mattered. He also had an innate understanding for what to keep secret and what to leak, and created in his office what amounted to a parallel government, carrying out in duplicate the functions of the National Security Council (NSC), the Office of Management and Budget, and - crucially - the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).Through the use of proxies (most notably the frightening David Addington, the hapless Alberto Gonzalez, and the delusional John Yoo); through discipline and secrecy; and through an acute sense of the vulnerabilities of his targets and opponents, Cheney would become not only the most powerful but, on his own terms, the most successful Vice President in history. Over eight years, he recast "the steely issues" in his own ideological image.To be sure, Gellman's tight focus on Cheney leaves something to be desired. A kind of foreshortening makes certain tangential objects - notably, the President - appear smaller than they likely were in real life. But Angler is no partisan hit-job; Gellman understands that Cheney is sincere in his sense of mission. The book quotes a letter Cheney wrote to his grandchildren on a day when he briefly became acting president (Bush was under anesthesia. There's a punchline here somewhere.):'My principal focus as vice president has been to protect the American people in our way of life. As you grow, you will come to understand the sacrifices that each generation makes to preserve freedom and democracy for future generations.'And were the Obama Administration rapidly to dismantle Cheney's pet programs - and were, God forbid, a terrorist attack to occur on American soil soon after, after seven years without - we might view his instincts (if not his methods) in a different light. This may strike you as simplistic. Then again, so are the moral contours of the universe in which the Vice President believes himself to be operating.Jane Mayer's book, more broadly focused on "How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals," revisits many of Gellman's sources, and essentially corroborates his assertion that, under Cheney and Addington, OVP (the Office of the Vice President) sought to eradicate rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Because The Dark Side does not center on a single character, it lacks some of the narrative propulsion of Angler, but it probably offers a more comprehensive view of the workings of the Bush White House.That White House was not uniformly indifferent to civil liberties, Mayer shows. Her account illuminates not only the ineptitude of Gonzalez and the lawlessness of Yoo, but the supreme decency of Republican civil servants like Jack Goldsmith, head of OLC, and John Bellinger III, head counsel at NSC. Their adherence to the law - presumably a prerequisite for attorneys - comes to seem like heroism in comparison with what surrounded them. "Protect your client," one told Gonzalez, warning that torture could lead to prosecutions. Of course in the Bush White House, it was competence that rarely went unpunished.Through her meticulous sourcing and her dogged aggregation of the circumstantial evidence, Mayer persuades the reader that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the "black sites," and foreign prisons were not only licensed but encouraged high up the chain of command. This helps to explain why patterns of abuse migrated so quickly from Guantánamo to Iraq - those two chains converge at the very top. The President himself - well-meaning, shrewd in his way, but hostage at some deep level to his insecurities - emerges as the efficient cause for his Administration's human rights abuses. "We do not negotiate with ourselves," he says at one point. As a candidate, George W. Bush was much maligned for his malapropisms, but it was these royalist flourishes - "I intend to spend [my political capital]. It is my style" - that hold the key to the Presidential personality.Ultimately, the most valuable function of The Dark Side is to shred the Cheney camp's justifications for torture. In meticulous detail, the book explains why the abuses are illegal; why they are immoral; why they were uncalled for after September 11; and why they have been ineffective. And unlike Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's internment of Japanese-Americans, they almost became the permanent law of the land.Due to the heroic work of a small and shrinking cohort of investigative reporters, they will not. Ordinary Americans, their fears and longings expertly stoked by the White House, have so far seemed willing to stop there, to quit while we're ahead. Whatever we choose to do about the Bush Administration's misdeeds moving forward, though, we are no longer entitled to claim ignorance. And should our preference for attractive illusions over unpleasant truth allow some future president to reclaim the right to arrest without charges, to hold without habeas corpus, and to inflict on human beings "suffering 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure... or even death,'" we will have no one to blame but ourselves.Bonus link:Vanity Fair's"Oral History of the Bush White House"